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“When I heard ‘Wagon Wheel’ at my daughter’s high school talent contest, I don’t know what it was about the song, because I had heard the song before,” he told Radio.com. “When I heard it there I just thought, ‘Man some day I’m going to cut the song for a record.’ It was really one of those lightning bolt things that I can’t even explain.”

While Rucker admits he often says this about many songs, he never actually winds up cutting the track.

“But with that I just really wanted to cut the song. I didn’t know how big it was until after it came out and then I realized on college campuses a lot of people knew it.”

“Wagon Wheel” was originally written by Bob Dylan but never finished. The song was later completed by Old Crow Medicine Show‘s Ketch Secor, who wrote verses around Dylan’s original chorus and released the final product with his band in 2004. In an interview with South Carolina newspaper The Beaufort Gazette, Old Crow Medicine Show founding member Critter Fuqua revealed how the band came to make it their own.

“I’d gotten a Dylan bootleg in like ninth grade and I let Ketch listen to it, and he wrote the verses because Bob kind of mumbles them and that was it,” he said. “We’ve been playing that song since we were like 17, and it’s funny because we’ve never met Dylan, but the song is technically co-written by Bob Dylan.”